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Tales of the Scales (Week 8)

When I was in the Corporate world, which was almost 2 years ago now, we used to hold Daily and Weekly Operational Review meetings (or DORs and WORs for short). The idea was to spend no more than 15 minutes each day or 1 hour each week to review how things were progressing versus our team objectives – via Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs for short). I guess many of you will already be familiar with this process and I’d like to follow this concept through in my Weekly Review of my weight loss programme, posted last week. To save you looking it up, the aim was/is to lose 1kg, or just over 2lbs, per week leading up to my Zurich marathon on April 9th (i.e. Week 14) and reduce my 77.7 kg (171 lb) slightly paunchy frame of last week to a more lightweight 70.7 kg (156 lb).

Now, what most of you will not be so familiar with is the style of reporting – whereby each KPI is reported in some form of visual or graphical form and the latest position is either green or red. (This makes it very easy to see the latest position at a glance). There are no ‘almost made the target’ or amber traffic lights in this system. You either made the target or you didn’t. And, if you didn’t, someone in the team (in this case me) has to take an action to do something about it. In extremis, if the latest position stays red for any length of time, then someone would volunteer, or be volunteered, to carry out a Go, See, Think, Do (GSTD) exercise to get to the root cause of the issue. More on that topic maybe if anyone is really interested.

Getting back to the plan… I vowed to cut out that extra piece of toast in the morning, cakes and biscuits with coffee and tea throughout the day and one less beer every night. This is Plan A and I have a Plan B, or even C, if I don’t quite get there. Hopefully we’ll not need to use Plan D, which involves the dreaded ‘S’ word – Salads!

So how did it go ? Well, I did only have one slice of toast all week and I resisted those delicious cupcakes upon return from my run last Tuesday. BUT, the freshly baked scones were too good to miss, so one of them went down very nicely as part of my ‘recovery’. And over the next 2 days, those 2 cupcakes were far too good to throw away and so they disappeared too. Then on Friday we were invited to our neighbours for coffee and it would have been rude to refuse a slice of the most delicious apple tart. On Saturday we were invited out for dinner, so you can imagine… though I did skip on the dessert. My beer consumption has gone down, though wine consumption has increased.

So how did I do ? Drum roll please….

The scales do not lie…

This represents a loss of 1.2 kg. So, my graph is green and no further action required on my part (other than not to be so weak when it comes to those cakes!)

Since were also talking marathon training here, I thought I’d add another important measure, which is the amount of exercise I’ve been doing. After all weight loss is not only about the input, but also the output as well. So below is the number of kilometres that I’ve run each week this year. Since that’s not very much, and I have been walking quite a bit, I’ve decided to show both together, versus my ideal running plan (i.e. what I would like to do if my ageing legs were up to the task). Note that the weeks in this chart run from Monday to Sunday.

beer consumption down, wine consumption goes up, why does that sound familiar…oh yeah, me too!! ‘cept I haven’t had much luck with the weight loss despite my training plan pushing me over 70km running this past week – think I’m trending in the right direction though so i’ll keep my status report at green for now – love the charts and graphs btw…we still do the same thing in tech, we just call them daily standups and my project reporting is traffic lights, red, yellow, green…nice post Mikey, cheers!

Glad you liked the graphs. I should have mentioned that we also stood up for those meetings, so they sound the same – but no yellow / amber lights in ours… Good luck with your weight loss, with that sort of mileage it should be dropping off you. All the best, Jamesie!

Although I set off with the intention of doing 2 hours, I switched to doing a Half marathon in under 2 hours (if I could) and I just about got there in 1h 59m 20s! But it was tough and I had to grit my teeth for the last 5k. Luckily the cupcakes had gone upstairs when I got back, so I wasn’t tempted (unlike yesterday!) But I am now rehydrating with a beer (or two maybe). 🙂 For info it was 15 degrees and sunny in Sion today!

I’m glad you liked the style. It’s certainly straightforward to see how things are going when you have a number of charts on the board to review. If things are green you skip to the next chart and so on til you hit the reds… Then keep the discussion down to a minimum and get someone to take an action to do something about whatever has gone wrong. Some people hated it, but it certainly concentrates the mind and is a good way to get the team together to discuss other issues every day. No cake today – so far (though I know there are some cupcakes with our guests upstairs… Willpower, willpower…!) 🙂

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Mike is based in the beautiful, authentic village of Evolène in the Val d'Hérens, Switzerland, where he lives with his wonderful wife, Judith. Together they run Chalet Les Criquets (see link below).
He retired on 1st May 2015 and plans to fill this site with a mainly pictorial summary of his life during retirement. He hopes he and you enjoy his retirement ! :-)